.......................................FORN SIÐR URÞANK..........................................
..........................Deep Thought about the Old Ways...................................
I am Siegfried Goodfellow, author of "Wyrd Megin Thew : The Wild, Wooly Strength of Heathen Ways". Heathenry is a fantastic contribution to a renewed spiritual culture. Ur-Thanc is thought/thank-fulness bubbling up from the primordial depths. All Material Copyright Siegfried Goodfellow.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

The Clown-Skeptics

Every faith needs its clown-skeptics. Of this I am
certain. They must be welcome, and welcomed in, within certain bounds of
hospitality, if they can observe those guest-host relations. Odin welcomed in
Loki for a time, when he was more the jester than he was the saboteur. That
changed in time, and as he wore out his welcome with his ill, he was ousted ;
but for the time that he did serve, even his brand of capricious mischief was
given place to serve. That is what good is all about, after all : not namby-pamby
goody-two-shoe-ism, but finding a place where everything can contribute. That
takes work, skill, and vision, because some things it is difficult to find the
angle where they can really serve, but to do good in the world is not to
primarily enter in as a moralistic judge, but to find ways to turn even poison
into medicine, where it can be made to serve.

In this regard, atheists keep us on our toes, and
represent the skeptics the religious need to ensure that their spirituality
does not degenerate down that long, historically-established and
all-too-prevalent road of becoming mind control, delusion-serving, politically
pacifying drek.

But the baby is too often thrown out with the
bathwater. To call all perception of the subtle “delusion” is a form of spiritual autism, whereby very real
energetic currents in the world, that can be felt by the sensitive soul who
opens his or her heart, are left unperceived, and because unperceived, declared
to be nonexistent. Look, we can admit that there is a lot of bathwater in
religion as a whole, and even in more new agey kinds of things, and some of
that bathwater can be downright dangerous and pernicious. If we are awake and
aware, we know how easily deluded human beings can be. Why are we so often
Loki’s playtoys? And if we need a Loki’s Advocate, as it were, to skeptically
scathe that gullible, duped part of ourselves into smarting up so we stop being
Loki’s playtoy, so much the better. Loki is associated with baths (thus
Laugurday in Scandinavian countries, replacing Saturday, which may very well
have been accepted or heard, as I have argued before, as Saetur-day, Traitor’s
Day) ; in Saxo, under the heiti
Hiarni (“brainy”, a good nickname for his brand of clever and cunning
unwisdom), he is made to wash by Fridlief (a byname of Njord), and his scars
(from Thiasi’s eagle-thrashing) expose just who he is. Yet the fact of the
matter is that even bathwater can become greywater. In permaculture, every
waste is also a nutrient for some other component in the total energy system.
Inability to feel the subtle, even when we are surrounded by a circus of
charlatanism and spiritual carnival barkers, is a kind of autism that can blind
us to deep aspects of reality without which we are not fully alive.

And frankly, if one is going to invite in
clown-skeptics, they ought to be good, and they ought to be funny, and
sometimes the atheists take themselves
far too seriously. Their critique is usually pretty nuanced and even funny when
it comes to their main opponents, the monotheists, but when they broaden their
brushstrokes to tackle pagan religions, their unfamiliarity with the nuances of
autochthonic religions dulls their blades. They aren’t as funny because they
aren’t as accurate ; they don’t know the terrain. Hell, we’ve got a lot of nonsense
and puffed-up-ness in paganism that could use a good, critical edge, but it
falls flat if it doesn’t know what it is
talking about. Telling me that everything I experience is just nonsense and
delusion just doesn’t do the trick. My body and my senses tell me I am
experiencing something real. But at what level of reality am I feeling it?

We can be sensitive realists (and realistic
sensitives) and acknowledge that there is a broad spectrum of density in this
world, as it were, and thus there are great thresholds and distances to be
crossed between that which is very subtle and that which is very dense. I’ve
never seen telekinesis, and if it’s real, it’s got to be a very rare event, and
for very good reasons that have a great deal to do with hard, physical laws. My
spirituality need not violate laws of physics, as we understand them at denser
levels of things. And this is not simply a matter of retreating into quantum
physics and trying to utilize it as a cover for gobblygook, but rather,
understanding how chaos and complexity so wormhole, mole, and thread the energy
dynamics of matter at every level, that there may be (and certainly are)
nonlinear effects and Prigoninic emergences we aren’t aware of yet.

I celebrate the density of the world, its relative
impermeability to mere thought, and the sense of stability that brings. But
this does not deny the more subtle, energy flows that exist throughout the
universe, and which can be felt by the sensitive instrument that is the human
body. And that is not just random, airy-fairy talk. Acupuncture is an
acknowledged discipline and healing modality authorized by the public organs to
practice medicine. When I go on the table, I am not imagining : I am feeling the deep qi-flows of maegen and
hael redistributing themselves in my body with very real effects. Similarly,
qi-gong exercises can charge up a person’s qi enough that they can project qi
in such a way that some of its electromagnetic effects can be felt by others up
to a foot or more away. That too I have experienced directly, and there was
nothing imaginary about that at all. That doesn’t mean I’m ready to lift
buildings with my mind (or that I even project that we will be able to do that
someday, although with the increase in neurobiofeedback and other technologies,
who can arbitrarily set limits on possibility, even if we set probabilities
given our present knowledge a bit lower?), but it does mean there are things
going on in the world that don’t quite fit the perfectly rationalist paradigm
as presently understood. (I believe rationality can be bolstered and enriched
in such a way that it can be much more nuanced and full of color and vitality.)

Linear rationalism alone, however, is not enough to
understand things, and this is why a nonlinear approach is needed. As a
counselor, I help people work through dreams, and thus I have a great
appreciation for the sheer symbolic genius that manifests in dreams. Dreams
that clients feel are completely meaningless and banal, upon being worked, open
up like flowers that can reveal core issues in new and significant lights.
Freud, Lacan, and Jung, each in their own ways, revealed how close dreaming is
to our linguistic functions, and considered from an evolutionary level, the
emergence of language as an expression of the symbolic function has deep,
nonlinear, associative chains that indeed forms a kind of thinking. Whatever
bathwater you need to throw out from Freud, his notion that dreams compress
long strings of dream-thoughts into dense, multifaceted symbols, and that these
can be unlocked through associative work, still holds as strong as ever.

Odin’s wisdom does not disclude linear rationalism.
Why? Because under some circumstances in
this world, things travel in straight lines. But often they also curve, and
bend, and twist, and even arc, as in
Tesla coils. Thus, an ambidextrous approach is needed : thinking that can
meander with the bend and curve of the river in its turbulence, as well as
thinking that can follow Euclidean lines in their more geometric logic.

It is unfortunate that there is such a gap in
social awareness that when one talks of the Norse Gods, or the fairies, that it
is socially heard as a kind of wonkiness (and again, let’s be honest, we do
have our wonks in this regard), rather than being heard in the register of
something akin to, but different in important nuances from, Native American
spirituality, which since the 1970s has been accorded in some circles a measure
of respect, and a perception of depth. It is difficult talking to people about
this, and we’ve all probably felt that sense of embarrassment as words come out
of our mouth that we can hear their incorrect perception and misheard feedback
even as we speak them. To talk of feeling the fairies in the lush, green
mountains makes people wonder a bit about our sanity, instead of referencing
deep feelings attuned to energy currents in the hills, that feels real and
right, or at least is accorded some level of respect for the indigenous. But I
do feel these things, and speaking of the energy of the Gods, or of the
fair-folk is a vocabulary that allows common reference-points for real, felt
experiences. There is some social discourse that needs to be reclaimed.

In the meantime, we can welcome in the
clown-skeptics, but we can clown them back where they bumble and show
themselves the fools in their autism. As heathens, we have great ability to
laugh. Feel free to keep us on our toes, but we shall return the gift. A gift,
after all, calls for a gift. If your gift is poison, we shall try to turn it to
medicine, in our heathen quest to make good of the world in all its variety.
But should you become too poisonous, should you forget basic rules of
guestliness and hospitality, even under extended conditions of clown-welcoming,
then clown, you shall be shown the door, not because we take ourselves too
seriously, but because our laughter is deep and comes from the heart, and we
need our halls to be hearty and full of good mirth. To the degree you feed the
latter, we welcome you in with open arms and embrace.

2 Comments:

Political correctness is not going to turn autism from an impairment (which it is) to an advantage. I have nothing against blind people, but they cannot see. If I said someone was "spiritually blind", that wouldn't be a jab at the blind, but a proper metaphor for not being able to see. Similarly, a dearth of intuition, particularly regarding emotional and social situations, is one of the key characteristics of autism, amongst others. The application of spiritual autism to diagnose those who declare something nonexistent simply because they lack the capacity to feel it is appropriate, and throws out no slander upon those who legitimately suffer from this disorder. I know and love many who range on this spectrum, and they are awesome people. Inability to perceive something doesn't make someone bad ; it does disqualify them from definitive statements on that particular subject, however. I speak entirely logically and with no bias towards the feelings of any. I'm sorry that you were offended.